Geórgica / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Georgic

The mourners, carrying cypress branches, were stepping on the trail of tombs. They were singing in one voice slow lamentations, of intimate tenderness, extinguished in a compressed space. These moans, propagated in the plantation, were dying in the light of a livid sunset. Everyone was dressed in white linen for the procession occupied in pleasing the manes.
     A woman was advancing amid the concourse, gathered for the anniversary of her daughter, a maiden who had died the previous autumn; and she was presiding it with the dignity of a venerable feeling. The retinue was made up of peasants, who came from the remote places of the countryside, sensitive to the memory of the deceased virgin, and willing to sublimate her with the titles of new rural deity, tutelary of their farm work.
     They continued until alighting upon a ledge, where a few stones, pushed up against an austere tree, were defending the grave and making up an altar’s table. They quit the song for the sacrifice of a black animal, dedicated to the dark powers, according to an immemorial rite; and two graceful young men paid tribute to the first appearance of her numen, persisting in overcoming the lamentations.
     They recalled the girl’s beauty, the contemporaneous wonders of her death and the act of burying her under an opaque rain. They all became quiet at the first annunciation of the moon, and its scarce splendor, left a symbolic burning torch, and split up and departed consoled by the gentle night.




La torre de Timón (1925)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }